The reactor vessel and the spent fuel pool in nuclear power plants are principal locations of heat generation during the plant's operation or subsequent to a scram. In lightwater reactor installations, the heat produced in a reactor even after shutdown can be as much as 8% of the reactor's thermal power at the beginning of the scram decaying exponentially to less than 1% of the operating thermal power in a day's time. The heat energy produced by the irradiated nuclear fuel is deposited in the body of water surrounding the fuel in both the reactor and the fuel pool. Nuclear power plants are equipped with multiple systems to transfer the energy from the heated water mass (which is typically contaminated by traces of radionuclides) to a clean water loop (sometimes referred to as the component cooling water) using a shell-and-tube heat exchanger. The heat collected by the “component cooling water” is in turn rejected to the plant's natural heat sink such as a lake, a river, or an ocean through another tubular heat exchanger. The use of a closed loop component cooling water system to deliver the non-beneficial heat generated inside the nuclear plant (i.e., heat that cannot be harnessed as productive energy) to the aqueous environment has been the universal means of removing heat from the (potentially contaminated) fuel-exposed water in a nuclear plant. However, the recent devastating tsunami in the wake of the massive earthquake in the Pacific Ocean that struck Fukushima Daiichi plants in Japan showed the vulnerability in the state-of-the-art nuclear plant design practice. The Fukushima catastrophe suggests that the means for removing the plant's decay heat should be diversified to include direct rejection to air to further harden nuclear plants against beyond-the-design basis extreme environmental phenomena.